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I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

rameerez.com

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Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#281

Post by jwr »

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible).

One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bunch of IPs with freshly-installed base OSs. That means ansible or something similar.

If you insist on using cloud (virtual) servers, do yourself a favor and use DigitalOcean, it is simple and direct and will let you keep your sanity. I use DO as a third-tier disaster recovery scenario, with terraform for bringing up the cluster and the same ansible setup for setting everything up.

I am amused by the section about not making friends saying this :-) — most developer communities tend to develop a herd mentality, where something is either all the rage, or is "dead", and people are afraid to use their brains to experiment and make rational decisions.

Me, I'm rather happy that my competitors fight with AWS/Azure access rights management systems, pay a lot of money for hosting and network bandwith, and then waste time on Kubernetes because it's all the rage. I'll stick to my boring JVM-hosted Clojure monolith, deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers and live well off the revenue from my business.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#282

Post by bambax »

John23832 wrote: post #109
Sebb767 wrote: post #16

I dislike those black and white takes a lot. It's absolutely true that most startups that just run an EC2 instance will save a lot of cash going to Hetzner, Linode, Digital Ocean or whatever. I do host at Hetzner myself and so do a lot of my clients. That being said, the cloud does have a lot of advantages: - You're getting a lot of services readily available. Need offsite backups? A few clicks. Managed database? A f…

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require. You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

Exactly! I've been self hosting for about two years now, on a NAS with Cloudflare in front of it. I need the NAS anyway, and Cloudflare is free, so the marginal cost is zero. (And even if the CDN weren't free it probably wouldn't cost much.)

I had two projects reach the front page of HN last year, everything worked like a charm.

It's unlikely I'll ever go back to professional hosting, "cloud" or not.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#283

Post by immibis »

Even if you don't end up switching, the lesson from this person's experience and the comments here on HN is: Stop being afraid.

People make all sorts of excuses: it's not secure, it's not reliable, it doesn't scale. These are primarily people who have never touched a server. If they had, they would know actual tradeoffs instead of excuses. So go and touch a server and learn how it works.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#284

Post by fulafel »

sofixa wrote: post #233
fulafel wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And learning TypeScript and CDK, if we're comparing scripted, repeatable setups which you should be doing from the start.

> repeatable setups which you should be doing from the start Yes, but not with > TypeScript and CDK Unless your business includes managing infrastructure with your product, for whatever reason (like you provision EC2 instances for your customers and that's all you do), there is no reason to shoot yourself in the foot with a fully fledged programming language for something that needs to be as stable as infrastructure.…

I think declarative is nicer too, but choosing a non mainstream tech here takes self-confidence in the matter that inexperienced AWSers are unlikely to have.

And learning something arguably better, like Cloudformation / Terraform / SST, is still a hurdle.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#285

Post by immibis »

pnutjam wrote: post #265
maccard wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12TB is $960/month in gp3 storage alone. You can buy 12TB of NVMe storage for less than $960, and it will be orders of magnitude faster than AWS. Your use case is the _worst_ use case for the cloud.

The most consistent misunderstanding I see about the cloud, is disk I/O. Nobody understands how slow your standard cloud disk is under load. They see good performance and assume that will always be the case. They don't realize that most cloud disks use a form of token tracking where they build up I/O over time and if you have bursts or sustained high I/O load you will very quickly notice that your disk speeds are gar…

At one time I had a project to run a cryptocurrency node for BSC (this is basically a fork of Ethereum with all the performance settings cranked up to 11, and blocks centrally issued instead of being mined). It's very sensitive to random access disk throughput and latency. At the time I had a few tiny VPS on AWS and a spinning drive at home, so I evaluated running it there. Even besides the price, you simply cannot run it on AWS EBS because the disk is just too slow to validate each block before the next one arrives. I spent a few hundred dollars and bought an NVMe SSD for my home computer instead.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#286

Post by John23832 »

bambax wrote: post #282
John23832 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't actually need any of those things until you no longer have a "project", but a business which will allow you to pay for the things you require. You'd be amazed by how far you can get with a home linux box and cloudflare tunnels.

Exactly! I've been self hosting for about two years now, on a NAS with Cloudflare in front of it. I need the NAS anyway, and Cloudflare is free, so the marginal cost is zero. (And even if the CDN weren't free it probably wouldn't cost much.) I had two projects reach the front page of HN last year, everything worked like a charm. It's unlikely I'll ever go back to professional hosting, "cloud" or not.

If you have explosive growth, sure cloud.

The vast majority of us that are actually technically capable are better served self hosting.

Especially with tools like cloudflare tunnels and Tailscale.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#287

Post by le-mark »

jwr wrote: post #281

This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as "cloud servers" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun…

Have you written about your app and revenue anywhere we can read about it? Looks interesting.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#288

Post by immibis »

wongarsu wrote: post #247
c0balt wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too push the point too hard, but a "dev environment" for a product is for a business (not an individual consumer). Having a server (rack) in an office is not that hard, but alas the cloud might be better here for ease of administration.

And plenty of datacenters will be happy to give you some space in one of their racks. Not wanting to deal with backups or HA are decent reasons to put a database in the cloud (as long as you are aware how much you are overpaying). Not having a good place to put the server is not a good reason

If anyone's curious about the ballpark cost, a carrier-owned (?) DC near me that publishes prices (most don't) advertises a full rack for 650€ per month, including internet @ 20TB/month @ 1 Gbps, and 1kW power.

Though both of which are probably less than you'd need if you needed a full of rack of space, which I assume is part of the reason that pricing is almost always "contact us". I did not bother getting a quote just for the purpose of this comment. But another thing that people need to be less afraid of, when they're looking to actually spend a few digits of money and not just comment about it, is asking for quotes.

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#289

Post by maccard »

pnutjam wrote: post #265
maccard wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12TB is $960/month in gp3 storage alone. You can buy 12TB of NVMe storage for less than $960, and it will be orders of magnitude faster than AWS. Your use case is the _worst_ use case for the cloud.

The most consistent misunderstanding I see about the cloud, is disk I/O. Nobody understands how slow your standard cloud disk is under load. They see good performance and assume that will always be the case. They don't realize that most cloud disks use a form of token tracking where they build up I/O over time and if you have bursts or sustained high I/O load you will very quickly notice that your disk speeds are gar…

Even without that, you are still at the heart of it accessing over a SAN like interface with some sort of local cache. Getting an actual local drive on AWS the performance is night and day

Re: I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars

#290

Post by le-mark »

jgb1984 wrote: post #52
tqi wrote: post #35

I'd be more interested to understand (from folk who were there) what the conditions were that made AWS et al such a runaway hit. What did folks gain, and have those conditions meaningfully changed in some way that makes it less of a slam dunk? My recollection from working at a tech company in the early 2010s is that renting rack space and building servers was expensive and time consuming, estimating what the right ha…

You're falling into the false dichotomy that always comes up with these topics: as if the choice is between the cloud and renting rack space while applying your own thermal paste on the CPUs. In reality, for most people, renting dedicated servers is the goldilocks solution (not colocation with your own hardware). You get an incredible amount of power for a very reasonable price, but you don't need to drive to a datac…

I’d add this. Servers used to be viewed as pets; the system admins spent a lot time on snow flake configurations and managing each one. When we started standing up tens of servers to host the nodes of our app (early 2000s); the simple admin overhead was huge. One thing I have not seen mentioned here was how powerful ansible and similar tools were at simplifying server management. Iirc being able to provision and standup servers simply with known configurations was a huge win aws provided.
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